thought of the prophecies which had been made about her, and she no
longer read the paragraphs about herself in the newspapers. She kept her
brother's dockets and drew his papers. Alexander frowned a good deal,
and said it wasn't necessary, but she insisted that she must pay him in
some way for her education. She put his desk in order and gave him new
papers every other day, which practices he never could get her to
forego. In short, she settled down into a routine of study, office-work,
and regularly recurring attempts to _get in_. And when she finally did
get in, she had become a cynic. Everybody remembers, of course, how at
the end of his last term Judge Oldwigg announced his intention to retire
into private life and decline a reelection, and how the managers of the
party in power chose Judge Measy as their candidate for the vacant
place. The prospective judge was waited on privately by a deputation of
Mrs. Tarbell's friends, headed by Mrs. Pegley, and asked to define his
position on the Tarbell question. The deputation did not contain many
voters, and no bargain which Mr. Measy, as he then was, could have made
with it would have increased his majority very largely: as he was pretty
sure of a majority, he must be cleared of all suspicion of making a
bargain. But he did deliver to Mrs. Pegley an oracular answer, which was
in course of time interpreted in Mrs. Tarbell's favor. She came up
before him; Mr. Juddson made the motion which he had so often made
before, and made it, I regret to say, in rather hurried tones, when, to
everybody's surprise, Judge Measy produced a manuscript and read it out,
and proved that a lawyer was a person who practiced law, and that
therefore, as a woman was a person, she could be a lawyer, interspersing
his remarks with graceful historical allusions and several profound
reflections upon the design of Nature in creating the female sex. Then,
acting as man, not judge, he descended to the side-bar, beckoned to Mrs.
Tarbell, grasped her by the hand, and made her a speech. "Madam," said
the courtly judge, "Mrs. Tarbell, I congratulate you,"--which was one